The Unity Community Center’s Food Production and Demonstration Garden I manage every year has had to move. We are in the process of relocating the Food Production and Demonstration Garden to an area behind Unity Community Center that Extension owns – formally the site of a children’s garden. The main problem that we need to solve prior to growing anything here is dealing with an infestation of Canada thistle. The picture included in this write-up features the installation of a heavy-duty grain bin silage tarp, salvaged from a local grain elevator’s garbage pile (photo credit: N. Frillman, Illinois Extension 2025).

Weed control is a constant barrier in the specialty crops production world – especially for vegetable growers. However, the Climate Resilient Organic Vegetable Production research group led by UW-Madison Extension researchers suggest that tarping with heavy black plastic silage tarps from late February to early June can kill even, or severely knock back, aggressive perennial weeds – especially in combination with a deep compost application and a summer multi-species cover crop mix.

Further, two McLean County specialty growers (the Table Farm and Workshop, and Meadow Lane Farms, respectively) have had success killing huge thistle infestations on their farms using the one-two punch of heavy silage tarp and deep compost application. 

The most important part of the silage tarp application for hard-to-control weeds is that the tarp edges must be completely buried with a thin to moderate level of soil. The idea is to heat up the soil so that the weeds emerge from dormancy, try to grow towards sunlight, and exhaust themselves looking for sunlight. This is known as stale seed-bedding to some. 

We applied our tarps on February 11th with a thick layer of soil along every edge. We plan to keep them on until June 1, remove the tarps, add 2-3” of compost, and then crop ½ the garden with tomatoes, peppers, potatoes, and winter squash. The other half of the garden will be planted into a cowpea, sorghum-Sudangrass, and sunflower three-way cover crop mix. We’ll see!

Over the last two months, McLean Co. Illinois and the surrounding area have experienced typical winter conditions, with temperatures fluctuating right around seasonal averages. In January this year, our average high temperatures were about 33 degrees F, and our average lows were around 18 degrees F. Notably, we did have an Arctic blast in early January that brought low temperatures in the single digits for several days in a row. 

According to the Illinois State Climatologist Trent Ford, January and February tend to be the two driest months in our state, and in the McLean County area, that has been the case. In January, we had a little less than 2 inches of snowfall, locally. A significant snow event that blanketed much of the Central and Southwestern portions of the state in snow left only .6” of snow accumulation in Bloomington. Recently, the Bloomington IL Water Department has switched Bloomington-Normal’s water supply from Lake Bloomington to Lake Evergreen, due to a 7.6” drop in Lake Bloomington water levels over the last year. The primary driver for refilling Lake Bloomington is rainfall and snow melt. 

We did have 3.8” in a February 12th snowfall, so hopefully, the lake levels will get a positive bump from that.